Journalists Dispute Claim They Helped Sell White House Iran Deal

NEW YORK — Two prominent foreign policy journalists are pushing back at The New York Times Magazine for what they described as a “defamatory” characterization in a much-discussed article.

The article, a nearly 10,000 -word profile of Deputy National Security Adviser for Strategic Communications Ben Rhodes, suggested that the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg and Al Monitor’s Laura Rozen “helped retail” the Obama administration’s argument for a nuclear deal with Iran. Both Goldberg and Rozen described the description as false, even slanderous, and criticized the working papers for failing to seek comment ahead of time.

“This is an unsupported, defamatory allegation that somehow slipped into The New York Times Magazine by a guy, it was appropriate to pointed out, who has had a grudge against me for several years, ” Goldberg told HuffPost.( He afterward wrote of once accepting, then declining, a position at Tablet, where Samuels was a senior editor and Samuels' wife is editor ).

On Monday, Times Magazine Editor-in-Chief Jake Silverstein defended the article’s language, telling HuffPost that the publication did not mean to connote the veteran journalists “were colluding with the administration.” Silverstein did acknowledge, however, that publication should have asked for their response prior to publication.

In the much-discussed profile, magazine writer David Samuels explored how the White House pushes its foreign policy narrative in the means and, specifically in the case of the Iran nuclear deal, how the administration was able to spin “often clueless reporters.” Rhodes candidly described creating an “echo chamber” in which experts speaking to reporters validated the administration’s debates. And Rhodes offered his unvarnished believes on how some reporters absence the experience and expertise of their predecessors.

“They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo, ” Rhodes said. “Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

But afterwards in the article, it’s Samuels who specifically identifies Goldberg and Rozen, each of whom have reported on foreign affairs for decades, as having helped promote the administration’s narrative.

As[ Director of Digital Response for the White House Office of Digital Strategy Tanya Somanader] explained how the process ran, I was struck by how naive the assumption of a “state of nature” must seem in an information surrounding that is mediated less and less by experienced editors and reporters with any real prior knowledge of the subjects they write about. “People construct their own sense of source and credibility now, ” she said. “They elect who they’re going to believe.” For those in need of more traditional-seeming forms of validation, handpicked Beltway insiders like Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic and Laura Rozen of Al-Monitor helped retail the administration’s narrative. “Laura Rozen was my RSS feed, ” Somanader offered. “She would just find everything and retweet it.”

Rozen said in an email that she is “seeking a correction from the editor and an apology for misleading and inaccurate affirmations made about me” in the profile.

“The New York Times Magazine editor has already acknowledged to me that the publication made a mistake by failing to give me a serious chance to respond and offer my blanket objection, ” she wrote.

“The magazine slandered me without speaking to me; or giving me a reasonable chance to strongly object, ” she added. “Samuels mischaracterizes the meaning of what the White House aide said to him about me: that she reads my Twitter feed. I should not have been named in the piece at all based on Samuels’ mischaracterization of her quote. It was a drive by shooting.”

In encompassing the Iran nuclear talks for four years, Rozen said her Twitter feed “has become one of the go-to follows for people around the world interested in this issue, ” and that the information she tweets and retweets “comes from a wide range of news sources, journalists, diplomats, governments, experts of broad and varied ideological views on Iran and many other foreign policy and political issues.”

In an email, Silverstein expressed support for the writer’s “helped retail” characterization, while acknowledging the two journalists should’ve been contacted.

“As I've told Goldberg and Rozen, we should have asked them for a response, and I regret that we did not do so, ” Silverstein told HuffPost. “As I also expressed to them, when David use the phrase' helped retail’ he did not mean to had indicated that Goldberg or Rozen were colluding with the administration. Instead, he meant that certain people within the White House were retailing their talking phases, and that they watched Goldberg and Rozen as helpful in doing so. David's extensive reporting supports this assertion. It is also important to note that David's piece is about a system for crafting and disseminating policy narrations, and because of his remarkable access, he was able to describe that system from the perspective of the people who operate it.”

Kimberly White via Getty Images

Jake Silverstein, the magazine's editor-in-chief, said the article didn't “ve been meaning to” connote the journalists were colluding with the Obama administration.

Samuels, a veteran magazine novelist, pitched Times Magazine editors late last year on a profile of Rhodes. Silverstein said the publication was interested in looking at how a 38 -year-old with a background in creative write was now “playing such a critical role in the formation and distribution of American foreign policy.”

“That idea was very interesting to us, this idea of storytelling and narrations and the role they play in the way the Obama administration is not merely communicates its message, but shapes its message in the first place, ” Silverstein said.

This is familiar territory for the magazine, which last year examined how the Obama White House communicated details of Osama bin Laden's death through the press. That cover story drew criticism from some prominent Washington journalists, including several in the paper's own Washington bureau.

After get a commitment from Times editors, Samuels approached Rhodes, who is not merely agreed to an interview, but also extensive access and offered astonishingly candid assessments of the foreign policy establishment and the press.

In recent days, critics of Samuels’ framing of events have seized on video of an April 2015 panel as evidence of his opposition to the Iran nuclear deal.

At the Hudson Institute event, Samuels described being “startled by the lack of attention and clarity” in much of what had been reported on the Iran deal, and indicated cutbacks in the media business led to a situation in which the Obama administration's claims weren't being as thoroughly vetted as they would've been in the past.

“What happens to a Democratic society when you decide to do away with the institutions of a free press? Because that is a decision, without knowing it, our country has made.” he said.

During the panel, Samuels described an apocalyptic scenario of “unchecked nuclear proliferation in a world where the United States has decided that it will no longer enforce the very, very basic structures we put in place after World War II in order to prevent the horror of a world in which many, many states, some of them led by people whose the concepts of reality depart from our own in very significant styles, are armed with weapons whose capacity to kill hundreds of thousands of people and to destroy if used in great numbers the basic the effective functioning of not just individual societies but of large chunks of the global system that feeds and offer basic security to billions of human beings on the planet.”

“This is a terrifying, frightening prospect, ” he said. “And that’s what’s at stake in this deal. And the incapacity of people to recognize that that is what we are talking about is, in part, tied to the institutional collapse of the structures in which I’ve spent a good deal of my own life working.”

Samuels argued in Slate in 2009 that Israel should bomb Iran before it can develop a atomic weapon. During the Hudson Institute panel, he said it was wrong to take the possibility of setting up a military strike off the table during negotiations.

The Times Magazine story doesn’t mention Samuels’ past, public concerns with the Iran deal.

“I don’t truly find that stuff to be relevant to what David did here, ” Silverstein said.

“The engine of this piece was the trust that David was able to build with Ben Rhodes, who was one of the primary architects of how that bargain was crafted and disseminated, ” Silverstein added.

The Times Magazine editor was of the view that Rhodes apparently “felt that he was going to be getting a fair shake” from Samuels given the access he provided. “I don’t believe he feels he was burned by David either, ” Silverstein said of Rhodes. “I think David told a very compelling tale and one that is true and accurate.”

“I’ve assured some people saying this was an ideological hitting undertaking, which is just ridiculous. I’ve also considered people saying it was a puffed piece, which is also ridiculous, ” Silverstein added. “I sort of take it as a trade mark of the success of the piece that it’s been such widely diverging reads on it. I think it’s a complicated tale, one with a lot of subtlety, and one that can’t be easily fit into a particular category.”

Rhodes took to Medium late Sunday night to respond to the story and explain how the White House advocated for the Iran deal. He was more complimentary toward the press this time around, writing that “there was no shortage of good reporting and analysis–positive, negative, and mixed–about the Iran deal.”

He also disputed the idea that Goldberg was hand-picked to assistance “retail” the White House’s message in a response to Goldberg.

“I told him that our goal was to try to convince you and a handful of other columnists that the Iran deal wasn’t a total tragedy, ” Rhodes recollected of his discussion with Samuels. “I told him I don’t believe I ever persuaded you that it was a good deal.”

This tale was updated with remarks from Silverstein and more information on Samuels' past commentaries on the Iran deal .